This summer I took my kids on a driving tour of the United States, including the Selma to Montgomery National Historic Trail in Alabama. I was shocked by what we found.

This summer I took my kids on a driving tour of the United States. Along the way we visited quite a few National Historic Sites from Gettysburg, to Fort Necessity, Pennsylvania (a fort from the French and Indian War), to Hopewell Mounds, Ohio (ancient mounds built by long-disappeared Indians), to the Westward Expansion museum in St. Louis, Missouri, to the Tall Grass Prairie Preserve in Kansas (a piece of pristine prairie complete with a resident buffalo herd), to name just a few. All of these sites were well-maintained and well-attended and at each I collected a glossy color pamphlet about the site with a history lesson and photos.

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Selma itself seems run down to the point of almost being a ghost town.

One of the final stops we made -- one I was most eager for my kids to see -- was the Selma to Montgomery National Historic Trail in Alabama. This is where brave Americans dared to march for their right to vote in the face of hostile locals and hostile state police. I wanted to show them the Edmund Pettus Bridge where, on Bloody Sunday -- March 7, 1965 -- John Lewis had his skull fractured by police for having the temerity to demand equal access to the democratic process, and where the police used rubber hoses wrapped in barbed wire to whip marchers back through town and up the steps of the Brown Chapel AME Church while white citizens of Selma stood on the sidewalks and cheered. For me, this is one of the pivotal moments in our nation's evolution into a real democracy -- a place where men and women faced tyranny with nothing but their bodies and who, with incredible bravery, dared to defy a corrupt society and demand change. These people freed us all, and they are heroes I wanted my kids to see.

So last week as dignitaries and presidents and hundreds of thousands gathered on the national mall in Washington to commemorate a milestone in the American struggle for freedom and equality, my kids and I drove past the red dirt roads of southern Alabama to commemorate another, and finally found ourselves in Selma. It was a Sunday afternoon and I thought surely we would have time to see some of the sites in Selma, and probably a museum or two. I was shocked by what we found.

Selma itself seems run down to the point of almost being a ghost town, but we saw this in small towns all across the country so that alone wasn't necessarily surprising. The center of town smells of sewerage, though, and you wouldn't know that the life of our country had changed forever right here, on this spot. The first place we happened upon was a memorial park on the far side of the Edmund Pettus Bridge. There are markers there for some of the civil rights leaders of the march and under a warped sheet of Plexiglas is a description of the events leading up to the march to Montgomery. I tried to read it to my kids but water had seeped in and made most of the text unreadable and I quickly gave up. There was a small memorial park of live oaks down by the river in honor of the marchers. I headed to the park with my kids but it was lonely and neglected, and I didn't feel comfortable walking down there. We went to look for a museum so we could get our bearings before touring the sites and I discovered that the small Interpretive Center was closed on Sundays because of sequestration. This was the first time I had encountered this problem on my month-long trip. Closed also was the private National Voting Rights Museum. The Tall Grass Preserve is open and ready for business, staffed by gleaming park rangers, but if you are an American interested in voting rights, how they came to be, and how they could just as easily go away, you're out of luck in Selma, Alabama.

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This period of our history, in this town, obviously is not much of a priority for us as a people.

With the help of the Internet and my iPad, we toured the site on our own, and I found an online copy of the National Park Service pamphlet that helped us navigate the landmarks of the march. There were occasional "Historic Route" signs along the road, and we found the police station and the churches. We even found the abandoned Good Samaritan Hospital, which in 1965 was the only African-American hospital in Alabama. There were large interpretive signs in front of several of the sites, but they were defaced, neglected, and torn, making them useless. The next day we drove back from Montgomery to the Interpretive Center in Lowndes County, Alabama, known in the bad old days as "Bloody Lowndes." In 1965, Lowndes was 80 percent black, but did not have a single registered black voter. The parking lot was almost empty and the front door was locked, so we were afraid it was closed again. Luckily, the back door was open but the place was empty and my kids were almost too spooked to enter. I pushed in and we did find a small museum and watched a movie on the march. We were the third, fourth and fifth visitors as of 1 p.m. In spite of being hard to find, the museum was well conceived and is definitely worth a visit. The National Park employee who worked there told me they locked the front door because there were only two staff members. "Maybe we should get a better sign, because it's hard to see that there is a museum," she said. I asked if they had a pamphlet about the march -- the one I had used online the day before, but she said to save money they were not printing them anymore. This was the first and only time on my trip that I had encountered closings forced by our current budgeting-by-sequestration.

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This period of our history, in this town, obviously is not much of a priority for us as a people. No interpretive audio guide, no tours, no signage, no nothing.

Jessica Weigmann

I was surprised and disappointed. I had emphasized to my kids that here was a site every bit as important as Gettysburg in our growth as a nation. In fact, more than any other two national sites or parks or seashores we visited this summer, Selma and Gettysburg are directly linked in history. Here, a century later, is where this country made good on the enormous sacrifice of Gettysburg. Here is where we taught the world that equality and justice are not inevitable, and must be fought for as in a war.

Surely, this would be an important place to preserve, commemorate, and visit not only to understand what this country was like less than fifty years ago, but to remember so that we might not be that again. What my kids and I found last week in South Alabama would break your heart.